MachineMachine /stream - tagged with text

Culturomics: Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 04:05:11 -0700

Culturomics: Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books: http://t.co/sBpgdz1Z via @mosabou #PDF #digital

Worth a new Mass?

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 08:06:14 -0700

Worth a new Mass? "How should seminal texts from the remote past be translated in a contemporary idiom?" http://t.co/K8ek35Lh

Zombie Editions: An Archaeology of POD Areopagiticas

Sun, 16 Oct 2011 09:06:15 -0700

This is a zombie edition, one of many I found for early modern texts on Amazon. Produced as cheap print-on-demand editions from EEBO or GoogleBook scans, they're listed alongside reputable scholarly print editions published by university presses, indistinguishable at first glance except for a few glaring markers. Like a mismatched cover image -- -- or excessively expressive titles: Closer examination reveals their undead status. In the case of English Reprints Jhon Milton Areopagitica, the publisher is the aptly-named BiblioLife, a project of BiblioLabs, which designs software "to address the challenges of cost-effectively bringing old books back to life." (BiblioLabs takes…

Internet Activist Aaron Swartz Indicted for Data Theft: Downloading Millions of Academic Articles

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 04:10:10 -0700

For a long time, it was the folks who downloaded music or movies illegally that faced the wrath of government prosecutors. So the unsealing of an indictment today against Aaron Swartz, former Reddit-er and founder of Demand Progress, for the illegal download of some 4 million-odd academic journal articles may sound a bit unusual.
Demand Progress has issued a statement suggesting Swartz's actions were akin to "checking too many books out of the library." But the government clearly disagrees as the charges include wire fraud, computer fraud, and unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer. Schwartz now faces up…

How to survive the age of distraction

Sat, 25 Jun 2011 05:21:36 -0700

The book – the physical paper book – is being circled by a shoal of sharks, with sales down 9 per cent this year alone. It's being chewed by the e-book. It's being gored by the death of the bookshop and the library. And most importantly, the mental space it occupied is being eroded by the thousand Weapons of Mass Distraction that surround us all. It's hard to admit, but we all sense it: it is becoming almost physically harder to read books.

In his gorgeous little book The Lost Art of Reading – Why Books Matter…

How Catholicism made Marshall McLuhan one of the twentieth century’s freest and finest thinkers

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 09:16:25 -0700

APPROPRIATELY ENOUGH, a century after his birth in 1911, Marshall McLuhan has found a second life on the Internet. YouTube and other sites are a rich repository of McLuhan interviews, revealing that the late media sage still has the power to provoke and infuriate. Connoisseurs of Canadian television should track down a 1968 episode of a CBC program called The Summer Way, a highbrow cultural and political show that once featured a half-hour debate about technology between McLuhan and the novelist Norman Mailer.

Both freewheeling public intellectuals with a penchant for making wild statements, Mailer and McLuhan…

Post-Artifact Books and Publishing

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 08:50:47 -0700

We will always debate:
the quality of the paper, the pixel density of the display;
the cloth used on covers, the interface for highlighting;
location by page, location by paragraph.

But really, who cares? 3

Hunting surface analogs between the printed and the digital book is a dangerous honeypot. There is a compulsion to believe the magic of a book lies in its surface.

In reality, the book worth considering consists only of relationships. Relationships between ideas and recipients. Between writer and reader. Between readers and other readers…

Reading revolutions: Online digital text and implications for reading in academe

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 13:36:26 -0700

While the Internet is a text-saturated world, reading online screens tends to be significantly different from reading printed text. This review essay examines literature from a variety of disciplines on the technological, social, behavioural, and neuroscientific impacts that the Internet is having on the practice of reading. A particular focus is given to the reading behaviour of emerging university students, especially within Canada and the United States. A brief overview is provided of the recent transformation of academic libraries into providers of online digital text in addition to printed books and other materials, before looking at research on college students’…

Is Twitter writing, or is it speech? Why we need a new paradigm for our social media platforms

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 13:19:30 -0700

Which begs the question: What is Twitter, actually? (No, seriously!) And what type of communication is it, finally? If we’re wondering why heated debates about Twitter’s effect on information/politics/us tend to be at once so ubiquitous and so generally unsatisfying…the answer may be that, collectively, we have yet to come to consensus on a much more basic question: Is Twitter writing, or is it speech?

Twitter versus “Twitter”
The broader answer, sure, is that it shouldn’t matter. Twitter is…Twitter. It is what it is, and that should be enough. As a culture, though, we tend to…

Technology Of Writing

Wed, 11 May 2011 11:03:29 -0700

Technology of/on/about writing: A huge list of resources

The Font of the Hand

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 17:23:39 -0700

JUST AS IN OUR DAY a fervid minority denounces the digitization of literary experience, fifteenth-century literati responded to their own depredations. In 1492, Johannes Trithemius, Abbot of Sponheim, wrote De Laude Scriptorum, "In Praise of Scribes,” a polemic addressed to Gerlach, Abbot of Deutz. Trithemius’s intention was to uphold scribal preeminence while denouncing the temptations of the emerging press: “The printed book is made of paper and, like paper, will quickly disappear. But the scribe working with parchment ensures lasting remembrance for himself and for his text.” Trithemius asserted that movable type was no substitute for solitary transcription, as the…

Prop Theory in a Nutshell

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 10:31:38 -0700

Any time we interact with a representative art work – be it a painting, a sculpture, a song, a novel, a comic, a play, a film, or a game – it involves the exercise of our imagination, and as such we can see this deployment of our imagination as a game (in the manner of a child’s game of make-believe). Looking at a painting, we imagine we are perceiving what is depicted; listening to a song we imagine the story or sentiments mentioned in the lyrics and invoked by the music; reading a novel or comic or watching a film…

Errors in Things and “The Friendly Medium”

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 08:39:59 -0700

What is it about a particular media that makes it successful? Drawing a mini history from printing-press smudges to digital compression artefacts this lecture considers the value of error, chance and adaptation in contemporary media. Biological evolution unfolds through error, noise and mistake. Perhaps if we want to maximise the potential of media, of digital text and compressed file formats, we first need to determine their inherent redundancy. Or, more profoundly, to…

B.S.Johnson - Albert Angelo

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 07:59:53 -0700

Albert Angelo is the second novel written by the experimental novelist B. S. Johnson (1933–1973). Published in 1964, the book achieved fame for having holes cut in several pages as a narrative technique. It is written in an unusual and pioneering style, frequently changing from first-person narrative to third-person commentary, and often descending into stream-of-consciousness interior monologue. Like all of Johnson's novels it is an auto-biographical work.

The lost art of editing

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 04:32:53 -0700

But what happens the rest of the time? Away from the world of freak glitches, what fate befalls the writer as his or her magnum opus enters the publishing production chain? For some years now – almost as long as people have been predicting the death of the book – there have been murmurs throughout publishing that books are simply not edited in the way they once were, either on the kind of grand scale that might see the reworking of plot, character or tone, or at the more detailed level that ensures the accuracy of, for example, minute historical…

How the Internet Gets Inside Us

Thu, 10 Feb 2011 17:18:48 -0700

That the reality of machines can outpace the imagination of magic, and in so short a time, does tend to lend weight to the claim that the technological shifts in communication we’re living with are unprecedented. It isn’t just that we’ve lived one technological revolution among many; it’s that our technological revolution is the big social revolution that we live with. The past twenty years have seen a revolution less in morals, which have remained mostly static, than in means: you could already say “fuck” on HBO back in the eighties; the change has been our ability to tweet or…

Lev manovich: software culture. the common grammar of media

Mon, 13 Dec 2010 19:12:00 -0700

Professor of New Media Art at the University of California, both artist and graphic designer, Lev Manovich does not need further presentation. His first book “The language of New Media” (it came out in Italy in 2002 in the Olivares Edition) was one of the main reference points for many theorists, artists, communicators and designers, that were already well settled down in the “new technology” sector. Ten years later, thanks to the digital diffusion, grammar was already consolidated in the capitalism era and Lev Manovich decided to analyze and study that which today is seen as our “interface with the…

On (Text and) Exaptation

Mon, 06 Dec 2010 14:41:24 -0700

(This post was written as a kind of ‘prequel’ to a previous essay, Rancière’s Ignoramus)

‘Text’ originates from the Latin word texere, to weave. A material craft enabled by a human ingenuity for loops, knots and pattern. Whereas a single thread may collapse under its own weight, looped and intertwined threads originate their strength and texture as a network. The textile speaks of repetition and multiplicity, yet it is only once we back away from the tapestry that the larger picture comes into focus.

At an industrial scale textile looms expanded beyond the frame of their human operators. Reducing…

Talks Tree of Codes and Conceptual Art

Sat, 13 Nov 2010 16:58:00 -0700

There’s something about Jonathan Safran Foer that drives a certain breed of dyspeptic New York writer/blogger to drink—more so than usual, anyway. They chafe at the six-figure advances, the visiting professor gigs at Yale and NYU, the majestic Park Slope brownstone. There’s even a catchphrase for it—Schadenfoer!

However, those hoping for a colossal career misstep might want to pour another highball, because his latest book, Tree of Codes, is a quietly stunning work of art. The first major title by new London-based publisher Visual Editions, Tree of Codes was created by slicing out chunks of text from…

The Cognitive Program of Constructivism and a Reality that Remains Unknown

Fri, 12 Nov 2010 08:10:00 -0700

by Niklas Luhmann

The source of a distinction's guaranteeing reality lies in its own operative unity. It is, however, precisely as this unity that the distinction cannot be observed--except by means of another distinction which then assumes the function of a guarantor of reality. Another way of expressing this is to say the operation emerges simultaneously with the world which as a result remains cognitively unapproachable to the operation. The conclusion to be drawn from this is that the connection with the reality of the external world is established by the blind spot of the cognitive operation.…